I have every intention of making some honey vinegar. I just need to look up the Original gravity of the must so it will produce just enough alcohol to end up with 5% acetic acid vinegar. The beesource thread has a link to an old Michigan state phamplet that tells one how to produce vinegar with waste honey.

the link to the old Michigan state thing is way out dated. They state to boil honey and water to kill yeast and bacteria's. If your going to boil you might as well use white sugar and save your honey. Making good vinegar is really easy. We make it out of wine, mead, beer and cider

Fill a thoroughly cleaned wide-mouthed glass jar (a 700 ml mason jar will due fine) with about 500 ml of 1.05 specific gravity fresh cider. Fall(winter) apples, they have a higher sugar content if no water is aded after apples are pressed.

Add 50 ml of unpasteurized and unfiltered organic apple cider vinegar which contains some mother of vinegar (Available at most health food stores).This will quick-start the vinegar making process.

Cover the jar top with two layers of cheesecloth, this will allow vinegar bacteria and oxygen from the air to get to the surface of the cider without being contaminated with fruit flies and other pests.

Place the jar in a warm room but in a dark place away from sunlight, which will interfere with the action of the bacteria. The optimum temperature for vinegar making is about 75 F.

After about 2 weeks there will be a gelatinous white film floating on top of the liquid, this is the mother of vinegar, which is produced by the vinegar bacteria as it converts the alcohol into vinegar (acetic acid).

Allow the reaction to proceed for at least 4 to 8 weeks, then, if you started with a hard cider with 6% alcohol content, you should have a vinegar with about 5% acetic acid.

The age-old method for determining if the vinegar is complete is to simply smell and taste it. No odor or flavor of alcohol should be present.

A far more accurate way is to measure the acid content by titration. Inexpensive titration kits can be found at your local wine and beer making shop and are easy to use.

Once completed, store the apple cider vinegar into clean long necked glass containers equipped with plastic screw-type caps, and discard the thick mother of vinegar film or reuse it to start-up a new batch.

cider without the addition of any other fermentables will finish off at about 5% alcohol about the strength of beer. You can make a decent vinegar out of 5% but the mother can easily handle double that. I add Piloncillo to mine to bring the alcohol up to about 10%. Piloncillo is unrefined mexican cane sugar. It comes in small cones. It has alot of natural minerals that the yeast need. We started our vinegar making adventure by buying a bottle from the health food store. You need one that looks like it has snot sitting on the bottom. This is the mother. If you want to make vinegar out of something like beer or champagne (these are both really good especially dark beer) they need to be flat or no carbonation. We make ours in gallon jars w/ cheesecloth over the tops. You want alot of surface area exposed to oxygen so gallon jugs will work bout dont fill then up into the necks

the link to the old Michigan state thing is way out dated. They state to boil honey and water to kill yeast and bacteria's. If your going to boil you might as well use white sugar and save your honey. Making good vinegar is really easy. We make it out of wine, mead, beer and cider

I never boil honey for anything but I have melter honey that works great in meads (bochets) and I guess I will see if the vinegar minds. I have the curiosity and the honey. And 13 degrees and blowing snow! Time for these winter projects.

Vance I have made alot of beer wine and meads in the last 30 or so years but had never heard of bochets until today. Burnt Mead!!!! Very interesting!!! I would imagine it would be very caramel tasting. I have cooked white sugar to different degrees of darkness to add caramel (and some alcohol) to batches beers.

I bet you have melter honey laying around. Try making a traditional mead with say KIV-1116. after the fermentation is well underway, that burnt taste I hate in honey goes away and you get a caramel, some say toasted marshmallow taste. The carmelized honey doesn't ferment totally dry so you do get some residual sweetness. I have a batch of chokecherry melomel made with melter honey and I think it is going to be really special. This is not my invention, I learned it on a mead forum and extrapolated. Why boil perfectly good honey into tar when I already have a byproduct that resembled that result. I have a lot less melter honey too after I started washing my cappings and cleaning buckets with that wash water until it is around 1.1 on the hydrometer.

Speaking of burning white sugar, My Grampa used to "make Whiskey" by doctoring Everclear primarily with burned sugar. I was never offered a taste and he died before I was old enough he would have.

It has warmed up to 19 here and the snow is too wet to blow much. It won't go thru my snowblower so I am going to watch it melt this weekend.

I think I have almost 100#s of melter honey. My Kelly melters turn it jet black. My wife will use most of that for cooking but I will need to try this one. good winter project. I have 4 - 6gallon carboys working right now so I need to finish a couple of them before I start anything new